As special counsel Robert Mueller builds his case, relatives of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn are among those pressing the president to use his unique legal power and ‘put these defendants out of their misery.’

Don’t intervene in Libya again

As the Islamic State has captured more area in Libya in the past few months, the U.S. and European countries are worried that the militants will have yet another stronghold where they can plot attacks against Western interests. In response, President Barack Obama has authorized the military to bomb targets in the country. Some politicians are calling for even deeper U.S. involvement, including possibly ground troops.

The arguments for intervention in Libya sound eerily similar to those made just five years ago, before NATO undertook a bombing campaign that eventually killed former Libyan president Muammar Qaddafi, destabilized the country and created a power vacuum that ISIS has filled. Then, we heard of averting a humanitarian catastrophe and creating a democracy to defeat radicalism; now, we would settle for squashing ISIS. But the underlying belief that military force will produce stability and that the U.S. can reasonably predict the result of such a campaign remains the same.

As the U.S. considers whether to increase its military efforts, the advocates for intervention are attempting to rewrite the history of the first Libyan war to pave the way for more like it. But an honest accounting of the 2011 bombing campaign reveals it as yet another foolish adventure in the Middle East—and offers a lesson for why the U.S. shouldn’t intervene once again.

In March of 2011, the Obama Administration in concert with the U.N. Security Council set up a no-fly zone over Libya to protect peaceful, pro-western, pro-democracy Libyans who they felt were threatened under the reign of Qaddafi. Obama claimed the sole objective was a humanitarian one—to protect the people of Libya from their own government and to spread peace and democracy in a world that has never lived under democratic rule. The NATO bombing campaign continued throughout the summer and rebel forces captured and killed Qaddafi in October. On October 31, NATO ended its operations over Libya.

This humanitarian case for war convinced the world to drop bombs on Libya but the case was always filled with holes. Midway through the NATO campaign, the nonpartisan International Crisis Group (ICG) reported that the most dramatic story of anti-civilian violence was dubious, and the risk of exacerbating the humanitarian situation with NATO intervention was real. “[T]here are grounds for questioning the more sensational reports that the regime was using its air force to slaughter demonstrators,” ICG said, “let alone engaging in anything remotely warranting use of the term ‘genocide.’”

As journalist Michael Hastings reported in 2011, “Over the course of seven months, America spent $1 billion on the war in Libya. As NATO flew more than 22,000 sorties, including hundreds of bombing runs and drone strikes, the goal of the war quickly morphed from a limited desire to protect civilians into a more sweeping and aggressive push for regime change.”

Muammar Gadhafi at the United Nations Headquarters on September 23, 2009 in New York City. | Jeff Zelevansky/Getty Images

More recently in 2013, a policy brief from Alan Kuperman at Harvard’s prestigious Belfer Center found that the humanitarian case for intervention was significantly overstated in the run-up to war. The brief was tellingly entitled “Lessons from Libya: How Not to Intervene.” Kuperman explained how NATO’s initial humanitarian goals were replaced by regime change, which resulted in the spilling of more Libyan blood. “NATO’s action magnified the conflict’s duration about sixfold and its death toll at least sevenfold,” Kuperman estimates, “while also exacerbating human rights abuses, humanitarian suffering, Islamic radicalism, and weapons proliferation in Libya and its neighbors.” As others have argued, the dramatic stories of regime-sponsored genocide were mostly rebel propaganda designed to tug at Western heartstrings.

The result of the bombing campaign wasn’t a democratic, stable Libya. Instead, an estimated 30,000people died and many thousands were displaced. The country is now split between a group led by a former Qaddafi loyalist who controls territory in the east and a coalition of Islamist militias that control the capital, Tripoli, and much of the rest of the country. It is difficult to imagine how Libya could possibly be in worse shape today had NATO chosen bargaining over bombs to deal with Qaddafi—and he did try to bargain. Before its final fall, the beleaguered Qaddafi regime was willing and able to deal.

Leaders in the Pentagon recognized this when they allegedly opened back-channel negotiations in 2011,circumventing the State Department, with Qaddafi’s son and heir apparent in an effort to deescalate the situation. Qaddafi then publicly offered negotiations and internationally-monitored elections in an effort to avoid further NATO intervention, an offer U.S. officials rejected. Though by no means a trustworthy or laudable actor, the old regime was at least more tangible than the shifting sands of rival governments that have struggled to maintain even basic administrative function since the dictator’s death. Moreover, Qaddafi had previously cooperated with U.S. officials on counterterrorism and counterproliferation.

It is possible that a hypothetical Libya, one that hadn’t undergone Western-imposed regime change, would be just as unstable as the real one is now. Such speculation may be comforting for the architects of the 2011 war, but it is hardly a compelling argument for further entanglement today. If Libya was doomed either way, it is difficult to see why U.S. intervention was either necessary or wise.

The Obama administration does not deserve the complete blame for ISIS’s presence in Libya. But there were ample warnings in 2011 which the White House could have heeded—cautions that intervening could well lead to more misery, instability, and terrorism in Libya. One such admonition, from that ICG report, now looks particularly prophetic:

“If, in the event of such an escalation, the regime should soon suffer total military defeat, it would be reckless to ignore the possibility that the outcome may be not a transition to democracy but rather a potentially prolonged vacuum that could have grave political and security implications for Libya’s neighbours as well as aggravate an already serious humanitarian crisis.”

Exactly such a vacuum did arise thanks to American-led NATO intervention. ISIS is now trying to fill it, but that doesn’t mean that they will, and it certainly won’t be easy. They are merely one of many factions competing in a multisided civil war, and the others have proved their mettle on numerous occasions. They are unlikely to allow foreign interlopers to steal the country away from them.

Despite this clear record of failure, interventionists refuse to back down. The most recent example is the former director of Libya for the National Security Council, Ben Fishman, whoclaimed that “The Obama administration is not responsible for the rise of the Islamic State in Libya.”

A Libyan man inspects the damage in a destroyed building on March 4, 2016 in Laithi district, a central area that was recently reseized by forces loyal to Libya’s internationally recognized government in the eastern coastal city of Benghazi | Abdullah Doma /AFP/ via Getty Images.

This assertion—and more broadly the pardoning of anyone who orchestrated the disastrous 2011 intervention—is a necessary step in the current push to re-enter the Libyan quagmire. If they admit that the 2011 campaign failed, it will be hard to garner support for more bombing. That is why the cheerleaders for yet another intervention are anxious to shift the blame for Libya’s collapse elsewhere.

However, the outcome of the war has made a skeptic of U.S. intervention of one important actor: Barack Obama. In his recent interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, the president admitted that the intervention in Libya failed. “Libya proved to him,” Goldberg writes, “that the Middle East was best avoided.” The President reportedly told a former Senate colleague, “There is no way we should commit to governing the Middle East and North Africa…That would be a basic, fundamental mistake.” But despite these reservations, the president has already expanded the bombing campaign in Libya.

The battle for the future of Libya should be decided by the people of Libya. U.S. involvement would be unlikely to tip the scales decisively in the favor of our preferred faction—presuming we could find one—and would undermine its authority if it prevailed. And we shouldn’t be goaded into acting by our putative allies who have busily fueled the Libyan civil war, and others raging in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. U.S. officials should advise them to stay out, too. If they ignore that warning, and perpetuate the violence in Libya, they should understand that Americans won’t save them from the aftermath.

Having apparently learned nothing from the missteps in Libya and the ongoing catastrophe of nation-building in Iraq, the bipartisan foreign policy establishment is ready for another round. Counterfactual excuses and historical revisionism should not persuade us to let them try. Americans should understand that we don’t need to overthrow distant governments and roll the dice on what comes after in order to keep America safe. On the contrary, our track record over the last quarter century shows that such interventions often have the opposite effect.

Christopher Preble is vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.

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giuseppe marrosu

The problem with learning from recent mistakes is you can still repeat previous, even worst mistakes.
It is very easy to criticize the French-led (not US-led!) intervention against the Lybian government, now.
But then, when the mad man that ruled that territory like a king and his equally insane children were about to conquer Benghasi, no one really knew what could happen next.
Had there not been the air campaign to stop them, we could be dealing now with the same sense of shame and guilt we feel for the victims of the Srebrenica massacre and with a Lybian regime more hostile and cruel than ever. Who would we be blaming then for NOT helping the rebels?
It was never really a “humanitarian intervention”, regardless how it was justified, but rather a political one where democratic nations supported with force the request for democracy by a population living under a dictatorship. Remember, they held their first free elections after that.
In my humble opinion failure was avoidable and came for the following reasons:
1) the Lybians were and still are unprepared for democracy. They, not foreigners, are the main responsible for the present mess. A provisional, but not short, foreign rule, tasked with preparing the population for self-rule, as difficult and unwelcome as it might be, is the only solution I see.
2) they are unwilling to live under the same government. East, West and South Lybia have little in common besides having been left over for Italian colonization by the main European powers after the Turks left. It would probably be better to administer each separately. Drawing the borders and enforcing them would be a headache for sure but that’s exactly what the Lybians are up to; only, they are doing it in a messy and violent way when a foreign coalition with overwelming force could trace them based on equitable criteria and impose them.
3) the nations supporting the revolt did not find an accord on how to help the Lybians build their govenment(s) after the demise of the Qaddafis. Contrasting, short-sighted economic interests prevented them to cooperate effectively. By the way these interests were cited as a reason for France to intervene in the first place and for Italy to initially oppose the intervention, as the french hoped to gain stronger economic relations with post-rebellion Lybia while Italy already enjoyed such a position with the Qaddafis and could only suffer from regime change.
4) they did not have the vision and the popular support for a costly, dangerous, long mission to stabilize post-Qaddafi’s Lybia.

Now the problem is hard to solve because:
1) the US President lacks the willingness for further sacrifices for a far-away land that is not a real problem for his Country. With the Arabs, Africans and Europeans not taking as much responsibility as they should and the rise of Russia and China (and Trump) threatening America’s security and leadership, he has very good reasons.
2) European countries, in turn, lack the military, political and ideological strenght to step in the mess singularly and the unity that could allow them to intervene together. They would not feel they could defy the international order (the UN, the African Union) and the Lybians even if they were to conclude it would be the right thing to do. All this will not change unless Europe becomes a Country and its military forces are brought under one command.

In conclusion, everybody is responsible for this mess, the air campaign to support the rebellion was one of the few right things the world has done for Lybia in decades, and I do not see Lybia getting any better before the next US president is sworn in.
Meanwhile enjoy the show of a rotting Country by the Mediterrenean, boasting mnumental remains of the Roman Empire, now the prey of bands of pillagers and hosting a terrorist State.